Headrests situated on the top of vehicle seats provide comfort for an occupant and simultaneously offer protection from injuries such as whiplash. However, the headrest introduces a problem in vehicles in that they decrease the forward viewing area of any rear seat occupants (e.g., through the front windshield) and present an obstacle to the front seat occupants, especially the driver, when viewing the rear view mirrors (e.g., referring to the headrests located on the rear seats).
Additionally, the headrest is a seat extension by design, thus adding to the volume occupied by the seat, and thereby subtracts from the available cargo space in a vehicle. This can be a potential problem when attempting to load large or irregularly shaped cargo (e.g., lumber, skis and/or the like) into the interior of the vehicle, which can have a tendency to strike the headrest and cause damage thereto.
For this reason, certain seats of the past have been designed with removable headrests. However, a detached headrest may be lost or damaged. Other seats were designed without headrests, which effectively discarded the safety and ergonomic benefits provided by the headrest. Finally, some recent seat designs have included a selectively foldable headrest, such as found in commonly-assigned U.S. patent application Ser. No. 11/106,818, the entire specification of which is expressly incorporated herein by reference. However, conventional foldable headrests generally do not fold to a sufficient degree to provide greater occupant comfort/viewability and increased cargo space, and also have locking/unlocking mechanisms for folding the headrest from an upright locked position to a deployed downward or “dumped” position and back again that are very awkward, complicated to use, and are poorly designed.
Additionally, current headrest designs have shown the potential for demonstrating “looseness” or “chuck” when locked in the upright position. Though this does not pose any particular safety concerns, it poses the potential to “rattle” and can also be perceived by the consumer as indicative of overall poor headrest assembly quality. Additionally, foldable headrest designs should be strong and robust enough to withstand a vehicle crash without “dumping” and potentially injuring the occupant.
As such, one of the challenges of conventional headrest designs is to be compliant with applicable safety regulations, such as the upcoming MVSS202A safety standard, which has proven very difficult to meet thus far. This standard has proven to be very difficult to meet so far, especially for folding headrests, because it requires a design to be very rigid and robust, which is difficult to apply to a mechanism in a small area such as a headrest.
Accordingly, there exists a need for a new and improved headrest assembly that overcomes at least one of the aforementioned problems.